For example In 2011 76% of websites didn’t use a CMS at all, but as of January 2015 only 61.6% don’t currently use a CMS. At the end of 2014 WordPress held by far the largest share at 23% up from 19% the previous year.

WordPress also made progress on other fronts as highlighted by Matt Mullenweg’s state of the word address.

Key Trends

Increasing internationalization with non English downloads surpassing English ones for the first time in 2014

81 WordCamp’s in 2014 in 28 different countries

WordPress market share has risen from 19% in 2013 to 23% by the end of 2014.

Matt also announced that the WordPress plugin and theme directories will be fully localized, making it more accessible and fully translated for non-English speakers. “The discovery process [of themes and plugins] is prohibitive unless we make it a priority to offer the same discovery features that are in English to other languages.”Matt.

Conclusion

The number of WordPress users, themes, plugins, and applications grew strongly in 2014 and the trend looks likely to continue in 2015. But how much more could WordPress grow as a platform? And will other newer lightweight platforms like Ghost, which has been downloaded over 500,000 times since release, start eating market share in a move back towards simplicity?